Poetry. African & African American Studies. THE DEAR REMOTE NEARNESS OF YOU speaks poetry's origin in new and startling ways. This is the precise intelligence that knows it must step carefully across the light on the surface of the water... These poems form the contiguous dance of language choosing its own body at will, traveling across light and the dimensions of unarticulated history. This is the word rubbed onto the palimpsest of our being, the careful solo soprano in the space where music ends and poetry moves in to name what is eternal and what is only in the abbreviation of now. What a delightful book from Boston's Poet Laureate.--Afaa Michael Weaver